How useful do you find Beagle?

[ausmuso]

Are you a regular Beagle user?

I had been merrily Linuxing along for years before Beagle appeared on the scene.
Upon first arrival Beagle was announced as something of a must-have and I accepted it more or less by reflex.
Some month ago I realized that I never used it once. Meanwhile it was hogging my system's resources and slowing things down.
So I got rid of it. I haven't missed it once.

Am I somehow weird? What about you? Do you really find Beagle that useful?

[swerdna]

No I'm not, although I'd like to be a regular user. I like the idea of finding files based on keywords and so forth. But I can't stand the random slowing down of my system. I used to have to do the command "ps -aux" and locate beagle and kill it when my system spontaneously ground to a halt.

Not knowing what else tto do, I disable beagle as a matter of routine when I installeach semi-annual new version of SuSE.

But in beagle's defence we should note that it is well documented in our "docs" with a chapter located here:
/usr/share/doc/manual/opensuse-manual_en/manual/cha.gnome.beagle.html

[caf4926]

Removed at install as usual -
Strigi in kde4 also disabled

[deano_ferrari]

About as useful as a chocolate teapot

[ReferenceSeete]

I found it useful when I used it in KDE3 & Gnome variations of openSUSE. Even with a well organised file system, I find it faster to find a document through search than moving through the file system. Additionally, Beagle provides better search capability within certain apps than the apps themselves.

However since I prefer KDE4 as my desktop and Beagle had a poor implementation there (Beagle didn't supply results to Kickoff, the Kerry front-end was flaky and many KDE4 apps' data were not searched without manual intervention) it was too bothersome... especially considering how well it works with some other desktops.

Strigi is also a sort of haphazard thing currently...so system-wide search is half-baked at best in KDE 4 right now. For all the things I prefer about KDE 4, this is one area where currently there is no debate to be had between KDE 4 & Gnome. Many people have complained about Beagle eating up their resources, but I haven't had that problem with recent versions of the program. The only issue I've had with resource hoarding would be Kerry freezing up.

I haven't tried Beagle in a couple of months though, perhaps it deserves another shot to see if things have improved any.

[hcvv]

Routinely prevent it from installing at system installation since the moment it first was eating my resources and I only had a sketchy knowledge what it was about.

That means also that I have no experience with it since.

[seld]

I have kind of a list, which contains things,
that I should add, configure, etc after fresh install.

Somewhere on the top of the list stays this:
"remove anything *beagle* ".

If I need search, I use kfind, which is slow, but accurate.
(And doesn't eat your resources, when you don't use it.)

[ReferenceSeete]

So far...Beagle is still troubled on KDE4. Oh well, I'll just take this as an opportunity to help with testing/bug reporting.

In other news, I have to take back what I said about strigi and KDE4 desktop search. Oh it works, just the implementation is not what I expected. If you run the command "strigiclient" you'll get a concise gui that lets you add/remove directories, start/stop indexing, and search.

So strigi is functional (and boy does it index quickly!), it's just the 'obvious' methods - such as using the KDE settings panel - that do not.

Feels like a Saturday morning cartoon break, "The more you know"...

[Chrysantine]

zypper rm beagle && zypper al beagle

About wraps it up.

[eet]

I cannot live without some kind of desktop-search, be it Google Desktop or Beagle.

So, yes, I use Beagle everyday and am thankful that it's there. Although there still is an unfixed memory-leak...